I recently read “The Sages” by Charles Morris, which digs into the financial lives and brilliance of three men: Warren Buffett, George Soros, and Paul Volcker.

I’ve read a lot about Buffett over the years, very little on Soros, and I wasn’t familiar with Volcker at all, so this was an eye-opening book to read.

One of the big focuses of the book was how most of the brightest economists in the world were completely unable to predict major trends (like the big recession in 2008), yet these three men were always able to see things coming. How were they able to do that?

As they said in the intro:

“The real world of markets and governments is one where fallible humans act on dimly perceived trends—or, in Soros’s words, in a state of “radical uncertainty”—and frequently get it disastrously wrong.”

Perhaps more surprisingly is that all three took very different approaches to how they managed their finances and where they chose to put their money. They didn’t all find a single magic technique, but rather each of them used different ideas to help see what was coming.

As with most books that I read, I’ve put this one in Reading Refresh so you can get a deeper overview there, I’ve added flashcards from it to Ripple Recall, and you can watch this short overview video for a bit more.

I continue to see story after story about how bots are becoming the majority of the traffic on the internet, and they’re right. In fact, a recent study estimates that bots will outnumber humans on the internet by 1,000x in just a few years.

This means a few things.

First, measuring engagement/views with your content will becomes less and less valuable. While companies are working hard to filter out bot traffic, I suspect it will be losing game in the long run.

More importantly, though, humans will still be there. I’ve seen a few people recently complain that “it’s not worth it because the internet is only bots these days”, but you can look around and clearly see that it’s not true. Us humans are still spending enormous amounts of time online, and that’s not going to drop. We may account for less traffic than bots, but we’ll still be spending literally billions of hours online each day.

Perhaps the tricky part is understanding where humans will spend their time online. It’s likely that we’ll be spending increasing amounts of time in AI tools and directing our agents, making traditional marketing trickier. While some do that most of the time already, I still think we have a good bit of time before that becomes the norm (just like people continued to go to Blockbuster for years after Netflix came out).

While there are some that dream of a day where bots can do all of the work and we can all just relax and enjoy our lives, that seems unlikely to happen anytime soon. Until then, despite the vast number of bots on the internet, the humans will be there right alongside them.

Here’s a bit about what I wrote, read and learned over the past week. I hope you find it helpful!

Blog posts from the past week

• One post a week or 1,000 posts a day. If you’re using social media to try to grow your business, I’m increasingly convinced that you should pick one of two directions: Post once a week or post 1,000 times a day.
• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.
• Making my personal notes the center of my AI chats. AI tools are increasingly working to keep you locked in, which could be problematic in the long run.
• The Go-Giver, by Bob Burg and John David Mann. “Actually, successful people do this all the time. Typically, the more successful they are, the more willing they are to share their secrets with others.”
• The top spot in Google used to be a link. Now it’s a sentence. For the past 28 years, we’ve all fought to get the top link in Google results. The higher your link could be in the results, the more traffic you’d get. It was hard work to get to the top, but the goal was quite straightforward.
• “AI 2027” is right on track. One of the main critiques against AI 2027 was essentially “sure, that could potentially happen at some point, but your timeline is way too fast“. With the recent release of GPT-6 Astra, some of the data from AI 2027 is exactly on pace.

Books that I’m reading

I read for a total of 7:54 last week with the following:

• Finished “How to Measure Anything“
• Finished “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court“
• Continued “How to Talk to Anyone“
• Started “Careless People“
• Started “Mistborn: The Well of Ascension“

Tech Rec

Stealing the idea from my friends at the Tech Talk Y’all podcast, I’ll drop in some tech recommendation every week as well.

• Proton Mail: I first shared this more than two years ago, but if you want an easy-to-use and privacy-focused solution for your email, Proton is a fantastic tool to you. It works online just like Gmail and other services and you can use your own domain name with them. If you need a new email solution, they’re worth checking out.

I hope you found some value in this. If you ever have questions, ideas, or disagreements regarding anything I write, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

About a year ago I shared with you the “AI 2027” video, which was a rather bleak look at what AI might do to our future. The video was based on a long (and rather complex) research paper that you can read here, but the video is a much better way to easily understand the concept.

One of the main critiques against AI 2027 was essentially “sure, that could potentially happen at some point, but your timeline is way too fast“.

With the recent release of GPT-6 Astra, some of the data from AI 2027 is exactly on pace:

Granted, this is just one calculation of many that goes into this, and a huge number of other things would need to happen for anything close to AI 2027 to actually come true, but that chart doesn’t offer me very much peace.

For the past 28 years, we’ve all fought to get the top link in Google results. The higher your link could be in the results, the more traffic you’d get. It was hard work to get to the top, but the goal was quite straightforward.

Thanks to Gemini and AI as a whole, this is all changing. The top of Google is no longer the best link, but it’s just a description of what the user is likely trying to find. Does that description include information that your company has put out? Are you known as the answer to the questions that your customers ask the most?

The bigger challenge is the complexity of these answers. While ranking well in traditional Google search took a lot of work, the strategy was fairly straightforward. With AI answers, it’s a whole new game. Sure, much of what you’ve done in the past works here as well (and sites that ranked well in traditional Google search tend to rank well in AI search), but it’s so much more nuanced.

Understanding traditional SEO is a good start, then understanding things like “query fan-outs” is a good next step, and it just goes from there. Keep digging, keep learning, and we’ll figure how how to best position our companies in the new world of sentences over links.

Now that I’m using Reading Refresh to keep myself up to date on books I’ve read in the past, I thought I’d share some of them as they came back up. Today is Bob Burg and John David Mann’s “The Go-Giver“. This book is also available as a free flashcard deck on Ripple Recall.

The Go-Giver is a fable about a man named “Joe” who is at the end of his rope, but happens to meet “Pindar” who shows him the path to success — which is to put everyone else first. The book follows a fairly predicable path, but has a lot of great insights along the way.

Early on, Joe asks why Pindar is even willing to give his time and share his secrets. Pindar replies with:

“Actually, successful people do this all the time. Typically, the more successful they are, the more willing they are to share their secrets with others.”

He also shares some great insights into how we view the world, as our perspective greatly shapes what we see.

Go looking for people to take advantage of you, and they generally will. See the world as a dog-eat-dog place, and you’ll always find a bigger dog looking at you as if you’re his next meal. Go looking for the best in people, and you’ll be amazed at how much talent, ingenuity, empathy and goodwill you’ll find. Ultimately, the world treats you more or less the way you expect to be treated.

A great example of how to be a “Go-Giver” comes from this phone call that Joe has with a potential client. He historically would do everything he can to win the business, even it wasn’t a good fit, but instead he hands a particular customer off to a competitor of his. Here is the bit from the book:

He stared at the card and thought, “Give more in value, huh? Well, here goes nothing.” “Jim? Here, try this guy. Ed Barnes, B-A-R-N-E-S. I heard he’s pretty strong overseas. . . . Yes, he’s a competitor. I just thought he might be in a better position to help.” Joe didn’t know if he felt more like laughing or crying at the words coming out of his mouth. “No, you don’t owe me, Jim. I just hope it works out. Sorry we couldn’t help this time.” He clicked off the phone, set it on his desk and stared at it, lost in disbelief at what he’d just done. “This guy just blows me off—and I give him a referral?” he muttered. “And throw some good business at a competitor?!” He glanced up and saw Gus at his office door, gazing at him. Gus smiled and nodded.

That kind of behavior leads to what the book calls “The Law of Influence”, with this:

I mean a network of people who know you, like you and trust you. They might never buy a thing from you, but they’ve always got you in the backs of their minds.” He leaned forward and spoke with more intensity. “They’re people who are personally invested in seeing you succeed, y’see? And of course, that’s because you’re the same way about them. They’re your army of personal walking ambassadors. “When you’ve got your own army of personal walking ambassadors, you’ll have referrals coming your way faster than you can handle them.

There’s nothing mind-blowing in the book, but it’s a short (<3 hours) and enjoyable read, and likely worth your time. Grab a copy on Amazon, try some of our flashcards about the book on Ripple Recall, or watch this short video for a bit more:

As the battle for AI rages on, all of the major players (such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) are fighting to be the one you use most often. Because the memory of these tools is continuing to improve, the more you use one of them the more helpful it becomes. The downside is that the more a particular AI tool knows you, the more difficult it is to leave.

I suspect that the next few years will see a lot of shifts when it comes to ads and pricing, so keeping your options open will be increasingly valuable. While it’s not a simple solution, I’ve created something that you might be able to do yourself if you’re so inclined.

Over the last six months, I’ve moved my main notetaking system in a custom app that I built for myself in Lovable. It’s not available for others to use, but like most AI-built apps, that’s ok. This notes app fits me perfectly, and you can create your own that fits you.

I’ve set my notes app so that it syncs to an OpenAI “vector store”, which means I can have super fast AI chat about everything in my notes. It also means that if I decide that I want to use someone other than OpenAI I can just point my notes over there and use it instead. The main source of data for my AI chats is in my notes, that I control.

Here’s a quick video on how it works:

As I mention in the video, I don’t really understand how vector stores work, nor do I need to. I simply told Lovable to set it up and it walked me through the steps. If the time ever comes where it makes sense to move to a different provider, I can simply move.

The coming years will be super interesting when it comes to AI, but I figure it’s not a bad thing to have control over your notes and chat and this has turned into a pretty great way to to do it.

Now that I’m using Reading Refresh to keep myself up to date on books I’ve read in the past, I thought I’d share some of them as they came back up. Today is Don Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things“. This book is also available as a free flashcard deck on Ripple Recall.

There is a simple lesson from this book that I notice almost every day in my life: The “Norman Door”. In short, a “Norman Door” is a door to a building that has to put a label on whether to push or pull because the design of it is so poor. A great example is this door, which has handles on it (clearly for pulling) but is instructing users to push instead.

Specifically, he says:

Whenever you see hand-lettered signs pasted on doors, switches, or products, trying to explain how to work them, what to do and what not to do, you are also looking at poor design.

We only notice these things because they’re bad. Good design is intentionally hard to notice. From the book:

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.

While Norman is best known for his thoughts on doors, the book goes far deeper.

He also hits something that I struggle with quite a lot where I wish people would behave a certain way, but I need to accept that I can’t change their behavior. Norman says:

The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.

When trying to design something for many people, it can seem like the answer should just lie in the middle. That may be true sometimes, but other times it simply can’t work. He shares:

Some problems are not solved by adjustments or averages: Average a left-hander with a right-hander and what do you get?

He also explains the different mindset between designers and marketers. Both are important, but for very different reasons:

Designers understand what people really need. Marketing understands what people actually buy. These are not the same things, which is why both approaches are required.

Related to that, he shares this famous and oft-cited quote from Theodore Levitt:

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit. They want a quarter-inch hole.

You need to build a drill bit that does a fantastic job, and that’s what people need to buy, but they’re really coming to you so they can get the hole.

It’s an excellent eye-opening book, and it’s essential reading for anyone in design or marketing. Grab it on Amazon, try your hand at some flashcards for it on Ripple Recall, or watch the short video below for a bit more:

If you’re using social media to try to grow your business, I’m increasingly convinced that you should pick one of two directions:

• Post once a week.
• Post 1,000 times a day.

Post once a week

So many businesses fail to even post just one time a week, that increasing to merely once a week would be a huge step up. It’s like I shared back in June when when explained how “average” marketing would be amazing for a lot of businesses.

You won’t show up in suggested posts very often and almost certainly won’t go “viral” in any way, but having a pulse on there is a good thing. Increasing from once a week to two or three times a week won’t make a big difference (though I’ll share some exceptions at the end of this post), so write a great post and move on with your work.

Post 1,000 times a day

On the other side you have people like Gary Vaynerchuk that are literally posting 1,000 times a day. If you want to really make an impact on social media, you need to go all in. While 1,000 posts a day is unrealistic for most of us, if you want to really go after it you need to be posting at least 10-20 times every day. Personally, that sounds miserable.

Middle ground?

There’s really not much middle ground. Either “have a pulse” or “go all out”, but posting 2-4 times a week isn’t much better than just once for most businesses.

I mentioned at the top that there were some exceptions, mostly in places where people are expecting your content (like for a school or an event). For 99% of businesses, no one is eagerly awaiting your next post (“I can’t want to see what my local plumber shares next!”).

However, schools and similar organizations need to keep parents informed and parents will intentionally seek out those social profiles for updates. If you fall into that category, then post as you see fit.

For the other businesses out there, just make sure you keep a steady rhythm and you’ll do quite alright.

Here’s a bit about what I wrote, read and learned over the past week. I hope you find it helpful!

Blog posts from the past week

• The Growth Field Guide Assessment. Take this quick free assessment to see how your website stacks up.
• Banana Ball, by Jesse Cole. “To me, customer suggests some sort of transaction. Customers come and go. Fans never leave.”
• Using AI with your Analytics. I’ve been waiting for Google to add a simple AI interface to Google Analytics, but it still hasn’t happened yet. While I have no doubt that it’s coming eventually, I took it upon myself to create a simple version of that dream for our GreenMellen clients.
• Unlimited Memory, by Kevin Horsley. “I did not suddenly become a genius—I did not need to—I merely decided to use Kevin’s principles to transform my perceptions about my memory.”
• Clips are the main consumption method for the majority of the internet. “The world is ran by clips these days, on like TikTok feeds, Instagram Reels, and YouTube shorts. And like, it is arguably the most clippable thing ever. Any 10-second scene you could just throw on YouTube shorts and it go viral.”
• Our hotel has color TV. Virtually every tool is advertising some kind of AI integration; some of it is truly helpful, but much of it is just bolting AI onto an existing app to be cool.

Books that I’m reading

I read for a total of 9:12 last week with the following:

• Finished “The Sages“
• Finished “The Butcher’s Masquerade“
• Continued “How to Measure Anything“
• Started “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court“
• Started “How to Talk to Anyone“

Tech Rec

Stealing the idea from my friends at the Tech Talk Y’all podcast, I’ll drop in some tech recommendation every week as well.

• Project Gutenberg. This site contains nearly 80,000 free eBooks, including classics like “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” that I’m reading now. It’s a fantastic resource for classic books.

I hope you found some value in this. If you ever have questions, ideas, or disagreements regarding anything I write, please don’t hesitate to reach out.